Tagged: lesson

He was my best friend, my guidance, the one I always look up to and everything to me. I love him dearly, and I lost a big part of myself the day he left. I had never known before that grieve could feel this way. I cried every single day for the next 3 months. I didn’t know what I should be feeling. There was a stream of wide ranging intense emotions flowing inside me, in a way that I could not understand. Guilt, anger, sadness, void, relieved and everything else. Everything was so confusing as if the ground had been falling apart under my feet.

It was like falling into an endless hole without any grip where all I could see was darkness. Dark and cold; and lonely. There were bad days (trust me, they were really bad) when I didn’t feel like going out of my house or doing anything anymore. I started to hate everything and (almost) everyone. Everything seemed to be failed and broken, including me.

That time, I know exactly that life must go on—I just don’t know why.

It was depression that caught me in my worst condition last year and it was surprising—even to myself—that depression did not exactly feel the same way as what it’s been described in textbooks. Nor it was like what people complained on their social media. It was something different.

The whole experience was excruciatingly painful and immensely frightening.

It still is.

I constantly miss my dad and I miss my mom.

My bereavement is an on-going process and I might write about it more someday later. However, I’d like to share how it changed myself as a person and the way I see life, probably through some posts. As life has surprised and enlightened me in one of the most mentally exhausting way.

Since my dad died, I have become even more curious towards life. It’s captivating how life and death is interdependent towards one another where the death of one living being may give life to another. Even to some extent, we literally need to take the life of other living being to prolong ours. It’s also weird to see our life as something that represented merely by strings of attachment between us and everybody/everything else that we have built and nurtured during our course of life. We always constantly need to be attached with something or someone, as if that something defines on who we are. And then our fragile reality could have easily gone awry soon after something unexpected happened to the attachments we have developed.

It reminds me of how vulnerable and bleak our life is.

I feel like I’m being awakened by all of these intense emotion I have been dealing with regarding death. Probably Jim Morrison was right, pain is meant to wake us up; while most of the time we choose to avoid pain and the experience of it. We choose to be numb.

It gives me sense of clarity in a frustrating way (I don’t even know such thing could happen). We are so small and everything is momentary. We all will grow old and one day everyone and everything on this earth will eventually grow old and gone. It’s also frightening to realize that I will only live here briefly. It then brought me to another question of who I am and what I should be doing to my brief life since now I lost both my parents.

Well here I am, in the beginning of a new year with a lot of things to do and a lot of things to think of. Trying to be able to identify the “what is” instead of succumbing myself to ponder on the “what if”, before I could finally figure out the “how to”. Struggling with myself to find out what people really mean when they told me to embrace the unknown and living life to the fullest.